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Stories by Thomas Larson

Snakes are the new hamsters

To hold an anaconda, it’s best to spread your hands out like spatulas and let the snake lie there, feeling supported. If the serpent doesn’t feel buoyed in your hands, it will squirm and droop …

July 29, 2020
San Diego's undercovered violent side

He Should Have Known Better It had been another sleepless night for Chris Squire, pedaling around San Diego delivering drugs. When the sun rolled into the sky on August 14, 2006, he knew he was …

July 26, 2020
A select view of San Diego history

My Highschool Days With Lester Bangs When Lester Bangs moved to Detroit to join the staff of Creem magazine, we kept in touch with letters and phone calls that came less and less often. The …

July 19, 2020
What San Diego restaurant staffs eat, dumpster diving for dinner

What Insiders Eat Travis Murphy, also a cook, planned the staff’s daily dinner. At Nine-Ten, he said, the hardest part of arranging the staff meal, also called the “family meal,” was “to find something to …

July 4, 2020
Waiter at La Jolla's Tapenade, toilet cleaner at Spanky's

Tools of the Trade Have your friends and neighbors looked weighed down, put upon, or bent low to the ground lately? Perhaps they are! After all, many of the people we see around us tote …

June 28, 2020
Poignant human drama in San Diego

Never Die They used birth control until Jeffry finished three years of chiropractic school, passed his preceptorship, and established a practice in San Diego. Then, in their mid-30s, with “it’s now or never” nagging them, …

June 20, 2020
Spanish civil war vets, harrowing escape from Vietnam, POWs of Japan, Prince of Wales tossed from Hotel Del Coronado

The Forgotten War I do not recall putting my foot on Korean soil for the first time. I only remember the cold rain, and running, and others running with me. By David Burge, June 20, …

May 24, 2020
San Diego history you never knew

90 Years of Curl Elwell says Kahanamoku surfed the OB Pier, and when he did, he asked a teenaged lifeguard named Charlie Wright if he could store his board in Wright's beach shack. By Jeannette …

April 19, 2020
That pesky natural San Diego light

A Single Mother Alone in the World If the child-support check is late, I let it be. I resent having to beg for anything. I used to be on my ex like white on rice, …

April 18, 2020
Little Italy – will the flavor last?

Tiny rooms in Little Italy On a Little Italy plot where a Victorian house stood for more than a century, construction of tiny apartments is underway. The house, built in the 1890s at the corner …

Padres bribe city councilwoman (Moores gets off), Padres and the mob

Fun with Ralph: Excerpts From a Busy Man's Calendar Councilman Inzunza’s frantic lunch hours. “Virtually every business day at the stroke of 12 noon, the 34-year-old councilman can be seen strolling out of his 12th-story …

April 5, 2020
Best Reader stories from 2019

Hillcrest: gayborhood or ghetto? “I was only in West Hollywood for four years and I came from the East Coast by way of Las Vegas,” he says. “To me, Hillcrest is just normal. At least …

April 4, 2020
Best Reader stories from 2013

Movie lover's paradise Meanwhile, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video have shuttered their local outlets. Owner and buyer Guy Hanford understands why. “When you went into a Blockbuster or Hollywood to rent a film, you never engaged …

March 14, 2020
Best Reader stories from 2009

A San Diego Charger football game is one thing, fandom is something elseSilva's powder blue coffin was trimmed with gold — Charger colors. His body was dressed in a jersey honoring his favorite player, Lance …

February 29, 2020
Best Reader stories from 2006

Border angels I wanted to learn about a group called Border Angels that, among other things, sets out water in the desert areas of the 66-mile San Diego sector. Usually, gallon bottles of water are …

February 16, 2020
Best Reader stories from 2003

The white mask On Saturday, September 6, 1958, Marilyn Monroe and the 175-person company of Some Like It Hot arrived at the Hotel del Coronado to begin location shots, after filming in Hollywood the previous …

February 8, 2020
Best Reader stories from 2000

Rancho Peñasquitos boys, charged with hate crime The teenagers shot at Roman from the Subaru with the BB gun during three or four passes. They took turns shooting at him as they drove by, but …

January 26, 2020
Best Reader stories from 1999

Was Jesse Ventura a SEAL or a UDT guy? Well, I thought, Jesse certainly looks and sounds like many SEALs I’d known during my 16 years in the Teams. But I’d never known or even …

January 25, 2020
Paradise Hills strives for cohesion

Origin Guy Preuss is an affable, tanned, retired Navy Master Chief, a Vietnam vet. As the 30-year self-described “temporary” president of the local village council and the chair of the planning committee, he does what …

January 22, 2020
Ramona – a lot of stories

Was Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona real? During late winter and early spring of every year, a bit of confusion reigns up north in the town of Ramona. The folks at the chamber of commerce there …

San Diego's changing bugs

On the northwest corner of Montezuma Mesa, Marshal Hedin and I are easing down a steep stairway, scorched by the noonday sun. A biology professor at San Diego State, Hedin specializes in arachnids. He’s already …

November 20, 2019
Sorrento Valley – what little there is

Lost roads of San Diego:Sorrento Rd., Smilax, Edelweis There was also once a Smilax Road in Sorrento Valley, one in a series of short roads named for local flora. It paralleled the railroad tracks on …

September 23, 2019
San Diego State – an elite school

The Event: College Fair Night. The Venue: San Diego Convention Center. The Scene: A big-box room rowed with white linen-covered tables behind blue-curtained backdrops. The Hosts: More than 300 college admissions table-sitters selling the glories …

August 14, 2019
University City – UCSD's bedrooms

No trolley in my backyard A group of neighborhood conservationists in University City are hoping to put the brakes on a plan to extend trolley service from downtown San Diego's Santa Fe Depot to a …

35 glimpses at Lemon Grove

1 On January 5, 1931, 75 Mexican-American children were expelled from the Lemon Grove Grammar School. By decree of the school board, the principal, Jerome Green, blocked the doorway, proto-George-Wallace style, telling the kids to …

April 10, 2019
What they do with San Diego's abandoned babies and homeless dead

Today, a brace of mourners is bidding farewell to twins Baby Andy and Baby Honey, the briefest of brother and sister. Their scant hours among the living are over, the endlessness of eternity begun. Days …

January 23, 2019
Sorrento Valley lacks stickiness

In August 2018, many of us were aghast at a news story, summed up in the Union-Tribune’s webby headline, “Three dead in wrong-way I-805 crash in Sorrento Valley that shut down freeway for 6 hours.” …

November 21, 2018
Little Italy’s big — massive redevelopment

The Little Italy I love has always been its sumptuous food and sensual people, both of which, despite the nouveau riche takeover of late, remain as present and prosperous as ever. That Little Italy is …

January 17, 2018
Downtown San Diego's C Street: the manifestation of our vitality and gloom

It’s decision day in the city-council chambers, Two Broke Girls vs. Billions. Call it a classic smackdown between local architectural preservationists who want to save any Spanish Colonial Revival building (and think someone should pay) …

San Diego’s top 12 philanthropists

San Diego’s richest person is someone I’ve never heard of: Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer. The Rancho Santa Fe resident owns a 7 percent stake in the family business, Cargill, a purveyor of grain and agricultural commodities …

April 19, 2017
The oldest things in San Diego

Cemetery The thing about the dead that haunts us, in addition to having lost them, is that they are here, in the ground, buried or scattered, bones or ash. Their remains are marked, heralded, and …

August 31, 2016
Noisy Margaret Noble seeks friend not foe

Every scene in a drama, according to the late director Mike Nichols, is either a fight, a seduction, or a negotiation. He added, as a footnote, the same is true in life. The thrill, or …

The photo is not the boss of Kim Reasor

No one ogles the industrial vistas of Southern California. Those unsightly realms where giant cranes stipple the skyline. Where ship containers are stacked unemptied of their new Curvy Barbie dolls for Walmart. Where thickets of …

June 1, 2016
Between words and images

Now open at Cedar and Kettner downtown is yet another San Diego monument to the commute: a $24 million, trolley-side, ten-story (three levels below ground, seven above), 645-space parking structure, bestowing parking slots on County …

February 3, 2016
I don’t know why I’m a musician, because I don’t really care about music

Joe Garrison is a musical survivalist. The 64-year-old jazz and new music composer has shaped his artistic life to favor more beginnings than ends. Like his hero, Igor Stravinsky, he’s learned that to reinvent himself …

December 23, 2015
Before 16, Sherry Sotelo became adult in San Diego's juvenile court

Emancipation is designed to support kids, not to relieve parents.

July 22, 2015
Defibrillators spread around San Diego

Dr. Ken Anderson, the affable owner of Pacific Beach’s Anderson Medical Clinic, has his hands folded, fingers interlaced, on his desk. He’s remembering the date, September 26, 2010. That day, the temperature over 100 degrees …

April 1, 2015
Printers that can make (almost) anything

I have always thought that among humankind’s most lofty inventions is the printer — the machine, not the person.

January 28, 2015
San Diego’s most polluted areas

Urban drool seems to be the least of our problems.

San Diego reservoirs at record lows

How dry is it? Dry, dry, dry, dry, dry.

August 20, 2014
Contrary to popular wisdom, drones are already among — or above — San Diegans

I want to believe that when we talk about drones — also known as unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned aerial systems — whose bodies vary from pterodactyl-big to mosquito-small (the Robobee, a robotic insect, weighs …

February 5, 2014
The freeway struggle from Fallbrook – why migrants want that legal status

In California, legal noncitizens are 10 percent of the population.

December 31, 2013
Hugh Tech High alum Nico D’Amico-Barbour says no thanks to college

Young guys explain why they are passing on going to college. Absurd expense and subsequent debt is one reason, but even a young man from a well-off family sees other deterrents.

Curious objects from San Diego's past

San Diego's curios — each with their own separate stories.

January 30, 2013
Escondido maintenance man loses home to foreclosure defrauders

At least 550 Southern California homeowners have been victimized by the Zepeda brothers — their scheme to rake in foreclosure funds.

June 27, 2012
Kent Keigwin tases and strangles friend John Watson in La Jolla

It was March 2009 when the British-born siblings Gillian Ison and John Graham Watson met at Zermatt, a resort in the shadow of Switzerland’s Matterhorn. There, with family members, they indulged a passion for skiing: …

February 22, 2012
Stars gas station owner gets employees to burn his Ramona house

John Nesheiwat was parked in his car, a rosary on the seat beside him, about a mile from the North Woodson Drive rental home owned by James Kurtenbach, a 4000-square-foot luxury house in one of …

October 5, 2011
Is He a Citizen?

On Sixth Avenue, across the street from the block-long Family Court building, stands a row of converted single-family Victorian homes, their yards parking lots, their windows barred. Today those residencies are family-mediation agencies and immigration …

September 21, 2011
Driving after midnight in Poway, you will be stopped

"Basically,” says Aaron Meleen, a deputy sheriff traffic investigator working the night shift in Poway, “we don’t have much going on right now.” It’s a Monday evening, the onset of his 12½-hour shift, and we’re …

August 3, 2011
Russian boars let loose on Capitan Grande Indian Reservation

The only sign of life in Julian at 5:00 a.m. this April morning are men in white paper toques rolling out pie dough at the bright-lighted Julian Bakery. It’s a deep black morning when I …

August 4, 2010

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4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
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